Product-Aligned Agentic Quality Engineering Lead

As a senior Quality Engineering leader at our company, you will be responsible for owning end-to-end quality, release sign-off, and automation strategy across our platform, including AI agents, web applications, APIs, and databases. This role involves a blend of quality ownership, automation leadership, release authority, and product-aligned execution. You will be accountable for ensuring production quality and reducing defects through proactive automation and validation. Key Responsibilities: - End-to-End Quality Ownership & Release Sign-Off: - Own quality outcomes throughout the delivery lifecycle - Act as the release authority and make go/no-go decisions - Define and enforce quality gates across features, agents, and releases - Partner with Product and Engineering teams to balance speed and quality - Reduce production defects through proactive automation and validation - Automation-First Quality Strategy: - Define and own the automation roadmap for UI, API, DB, and agentic systems - Build and maintain hybrid automation frameworks using Python - Drive CI/CD-integrated automated testing pipelines - Ensure automation coverage continuously replaces repetitive manual testing - Guide Quality Engineers in automation implementation - Agentic AI & LLM Quality Engineering: - Own quality for AI agents, tool calls, and multi-step workflows - Validate agent behavior, tool invocation correctness, hallucinations, RAG accuracy, and grounding - Define and execute agent evaluation frameworks - Collaborate with Critic Engineers to design critic agents, automated agent validation, and benchmark datasets - Manual, Exploratory & Scenario-Based Testing: - Drive high-quality manual and exploratory testing - Design test scenarios covering edge cases, failure modes, and real-world flows - Ensure strong test data strategies and defect lifecycle management - Use manual testing strategically, not as a long-term solution - Product-Aligned Ownership: - Work as a quality-focused Product Owner partner - Align closely with Product Managers on acceptance criteria and readiness - Ensure quality is embedded into feature design from the beginning - Cross-Team Collaboration: - Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, AgenticOps, RAG & AI teams - Act as the single quality voice in delivery discussions - Mentor and guide Quality Engineers and contributors Required Skills & Experience: - Quality & Manual Testing: - 5+ years of hands-on experience in manual and exploratory testing - Strong understanding of SDLC/STLC, test planning, traceability, and defect management - Experience with API testing using tools like Postman and REST clients - Automation (UI, API, Database): - Strong experience in UI automation (Playwright, Selenium, Cypress) - API automation with tools like pytest, requests, and REST Assured - Database validation using SQL - Experience designing end-to-end automation frameworks - CI/CD integration experience - Agentic AI & LLM Testing: - Hands-on experience with LLMs and AI agents - Understanding of agent workflows, tool calling, RAG pipelines, and safety validation - Experience in designing or executing eval frameworks - Python, MCP & Cloud: - Strong Python skills for automation and validation - Understanding of MCP servers, agent tools, and orchestration - Cloud exposure in QA or automation contexts In this role, successful outcomes include predictable and confident releases, growing automation coverage sprint after sprint, catching agent failures before production, shared responsibility for quality, and reduced manual testing effort as automation matures. This role is special because it involves owning release sign-off, driving automation-first quality, shaping agentic AI testing, working closely with Product & CTO, leading innovation in AI testing, and not being a test executor or checkbox QA position. As a senior Quality Engineering leader at our company, you will be responsible for owning end-to-end quality, release sign-off, and automation strategy across our platform, including AI agents, web applications, APIs, and databases. This role involves a blend of quality ownership, automation leadership, release authority, and product-aligned execution. You will be accountable for ensuring production quality and reducing defects through proactive automation and validation. Key Responsibilities: - End-to-End Quality Ownership & Release Sign-Off: - Own quality outcomes throughout the delivery lifecycle - Act as the release authority and make go/no-go decisions - Define and enforce quality gates across features, agents, and releases - Partner with Product and Engineering teams to balance speed and quality - Reduce production defects through proactive automation and validation - Automation-First Quality Strategy: - Define and own the automation roadmap for UI, API, DB, an